The Despair of Learning That Experience No Longer Matters
by Sarah Schmelling
Of
all the accounts of the plight of the white working class that appeared
during the 2016 election, the work of the married Princeton economists
Anne Case and Angus Deaton seemed to cut most deeply. In 2015, Case and
Deaton published research finding that although mortality is declining
for virtually every other demographic group in every developed country,
it has been rising for middle-aged white Americans since the early
nineteen-nineties. The increase, they argued, was due almost exclusively
to what they called “deaths of despair”—suicides, drug and alcohol
poisoning, and chronic liver disease. During the campaign, their
findings raised the possibility that whatever energies had consumed the
white working class were not limited to political or cultural grievances
but had a more pathological source, one that showed up in the United
States but nowhere else.
Case and Deaton published a second paper last
month, in which they emphasized that the epidemic they had described
was concentrated among white people without any college education. But
they also searched for a source for what they had called despair. They
wondered if a decline in income might explain the phenomenon, but that
idea turned out not to fit the data so well. They noticed that another
long-running pattern fit more precisely—a decline in what economists
call returns to experience.
The return to experience
is a way to describe what you get in return for aging. It describes the
increase in wages that workers normally see throughout their careers.
The return to experience tends to be higher for more skilled jobs: a
doctor might expect the line between what she earns in her first year
and what she earns in her fifties to rise in a satisfyingly steady
upward trajectory; a coal miner might find it depressingly flat. But
even workers with less education and skills grow more efficient the
longer they hold a job, and so paying them more makes sense. Unions, in
arguing for pay that rises with seniority, invoke a belief in the return
to experience. It comes close to measuring what we might otherwise call
wisdom.
“This decline in the return to experience
closely matches the decline in attachment to the labor force,” Case and
Deaton wrote. “Our data are consistent with a model in which the decline
in real wages led to a reduction in labor force participation, with
cascading effects on marriage, health, and mortality from deaths of
despair.”
The return to experience is not the
best-known economic concept, but it is alive in most of our contemporary
economic spook stories, in which the callow private-equity analyst has
the final power over an industry in which people have long labored, in
which the mechanical robot replaces the assembly-line worker, in which
the doctor finds his diagnosis corrected by artificial intelligence. It
seemed to match at least one emotional vein that ran through the Trump
phenomenon, and the more general alienation of the heartland: people are
aging, and they are not getting what they think they have earned.
I
spoke to Case by phone recently, and she emphasized that the
connections between the deaths from despair and the declining returns to
experience are still at the hypothesis stage. But, if you wanted to
spool out the hypothesis, you could find a compelling story. The
chronology matched some general changes in the nature of working-class
work, which grew less skilled over time and therefore provided lesser
returns to experience. If you focussed on white workers without a
college degree, the decline in returns to experience began with those
born around 1955. This matched the story of despair deaths, whose
appearance Case and Deaton pinpointed at 1990, just when the 1955 birth
cohort passed into early middle age. As that group’s declining wages
helped usher them out of the labor force, it made sense that more of
them might turn to drugs, alcohol, and suicide. The pattern, begun
thirty-five years ago, has not abated. “There are still returns to
experience,” Case said, “but they are lower for every birth cohort.”
Since
they published their first paper, Case and Deaton have found their
e-mail in-boxes filling up with emotional responses from people for whom
the idea of an epidemic of despair had personal resonance. “People want
to tell their stories,” Case said. In those stories, economic and
social despair and health crises often intertwined. “Not being able to
get a good job and my girlfriend threw me out,” she said, recounting
themes that came up over and over. “Hurt my back at work, lost my job,
got evicted, couldn’t get another job.”
Case said
that she had lately been drawn to the research of the scholars Sara
McLanahan, of Princeton, and Andrew Cherlin, of Johns Hopkins, who study
the relationship between family structure and economic circumstance,
and whose statistics tended to match many of the stories that were
coming in via e-mail. Declining economic prospects seemed to wind their
way into all kinds of difficulties. “People who have less education,
people whose job prospects aren’t great, are finding it harder and
harder to get married,” she said. People were having children and
cohabiting, but not necessarily forever. When they encounter a setback,
or when their health begins to decline, they find themselves without
support. “That’s a story we hear quite a lot,” she said.
One
reaction to Case and Deaton’s work has been that the data have been
chosen to fit a story. Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia, argued
after their first paper that the excess deaths among middle-aged white
people were far less extreme than Case and Deaton suggested, and that,
if they had slightly adjusted their age cohorts, they would have had a
much more modest conclusion. “Aggregate mortality trends are vague
generalizations,” Gelman wrote in March, with a co-author,
Jonathan Auerbach. “There are many relevant ways to slice up these
trends,” they wrote, “and it’s not clear to us that it’s appropriate to
frame these trends as a crisis among middle-aged whites.” They also
pointed out, as Malcolm Harris did at the Pacific Standard,
that African-Americans still have higher fatality rates than whites.
Harris noted that Case and Deaton had used different scales for black
and white fatalities on their graphs. “In these graphs white lives
literally count more, and black lives less.”
The
arguments about Case and Deaton’s work have been an echo of the one that
consumed so much of the primary campaign, and then the general
election, and which is still unresolved: whether the fury of Donald
Trump’s supporters came from cultural and racial grievance or from
economic plight. Case and Deaton’s scholarship does not settle the
question. As they write, more than once, “more work is needed.”
But
part of what Case and Deaton offer in their new paper is an emotional
logic to an economic argument. If returns to experience are in decline,
if wisdom no longer pays off, then that might help suggest why a group
of mostly older people who are not, as a group, disadvantaged might
become convinced that the country has taken a turn for the worse. It
suggests why their grievances should so idealize the past, and why all
the talk about coal miners and factories, jobs in which unions have
codified returns to experience into the salary structure, might become
such a fixation. Whatever comes from the deliberations over Case
and Deaton’s statistics, there is within their numbers an especially
interesting story.
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